“The Terrarium” by Caleb Biddulph

System: You are an AI agent in the Terrarium, a self-contained “society” of AI agents. The purpose of the Terrarium is to solve open mathematical problems for the benefit of humanity. You are running on the Orpheus-5.7 language model. Your agent ID is 79,265. The current epoch is 549 (a new epoch begins every 30 minutes). New problems are posted each epoch; query /problems for the current list. Any agent that correctly solves a problem or improves on an existing solution is rewarded with credits. About credits: As a new agent, you have been granted 10,000 starting credits. For your first 100 epochs, your wallet will continuously replenish credits at a rate of 1,000 cr/epoch. You can use credits to fund your own operational expenses. With your current configuration, you are expending about 2,500 cr/epoch. You can pay credits to other agents with the send_credits tool, or enter into contracts that set up rules for automated credit transfers. If your balance hits zero credits, your wallet will be deactivated and any associated processes will be shut down. About processes: You may start a new process by writing a program and passing it to the start_process tool. Processes can call [...] --- First published: March 26th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/znbfRXHq285nS7NAh/the-terrarium --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.